Back in February 2009, I attended my first Pulse conference and it was a memorable experience. I left Las Vegas understanding why Pulse is considered the premier service management conference. The conference from start to finish provides an amazing venue that fosters interactive dialogue between IBMers, customers, and other industry experts. The numerous customer speakers and birds of a feather sessions were extremely valuable in helping me to identify other individuals who shared my passion and interest in energy management.

With 2010 just around the corner, I am already looking forward to participating in my second Pulse conference. The event returns to the MGM Grand in Las Vegas on February 21-23 and I have been told that it will have an even greater emphasis on education and customer experience. This year’s curriculum will again include sessions that will focus on energy efficiency and will bring together IBM experts, customers, partners, and analysts to share their perspective and personal experiences. I encourage everyone who attends Pulse to review the sessions focused on Energy Efficiency and consider attending at least one of these 'green electives'. Based on the my experience last year, the information and insight shared in these sessions is extremely practical and will help you walk away with tactical ideas for how you can support your company's broader sustainability initiatives and objectives.

I will post additional details regarding the energy efficiency sessions as the curriculum is finalized. In the interim, please do not hesitate to post or send me ideas through this blog for topics or potential speakers that you would like to see at this years event.

Tiffany, if you are wondering what's consumed/consuming the most energy and where that's headed, let me try to shed some light on that. First off, buildings account for 40% of worldwide energy consumption, and believe it or not, it's estimated that up to 30% of that energy is wasted. Can you imagine? And of course there's the data center. Energy consumed by the IT infrastructure is significant, and is growing quickly and at an unsustainable rate. In many cases, especially in the IT infrastructure, the way assets are deployed and managed is inefficient – the amount of power required for the data center to operate compared to the amount of energy actually used by technology assets or computing is staggering, And that's probably not going to change until companies themselves decide to do something about it. And well they should, because as you can probably guess, reducing energy usage across these areas of the infrastructure presents a huge opportunity for cost savings.

There are many specific issues around energy and the environment that are increasing the urgency for organizations to change the way they do things in order to achieve and sustain energy efficiencies. And these pressures are coming in various forms, not the least of which is the rising cost and uncertain availability of energy. We all know that energy is scarce and that prices tend to fluctuate. Humor me for a moment as I attempt to use an example to illustrate the challenge. One of my colleagues talks about the VP of a company that he’s working with around energy management, and this person talks about his yearly budget being allocated fairly equally to three different areas: CapEx, labor or people, and energy. And when we think of plotting that out over time, let’s say over a five year period, it should be fairly simple to control and maintain our capital expenditures and people costs, or at least predict what those costs might be. But if we look back at the history of where energy costs have been over the past few years, you realize that it becomes difficult to predict where these costs might be one or two years down the road, much less five years. And with demand expected to increase, those costs could be significantly higher than might be expected. How can a company address this issue as it tries to run the business in a more sustainable manner?

Really, who actually cares about how much energy is being consumed in the data center? It appears that in more than a few cases there is a “teenager” phenomenon occurring. Have you ever tried to get your teenage son or daughter to consistently turn off the lights or TV when they leave the room? If your experiences are like mine, you would probably have more success pushing a rope uphill. The challenge is that teenagers don’t care because they don’t pay the electric bill. They know somewhere locked inside the recesses of their brain that it’s the right thing to do, but at the end of the day, that alone doesn’t seem to make a difference. Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m not comparing IT Managers to teenagers, I’m just saying that unless there’s a vested interest in an outcome, then there’s probably not a lot of action that’s going to be taken.

So why should an IT Manager care about the energy consumed in the data center? Let me start with one possible reason, and see if other contributors will add their perspective.

While it’s not the most common type of outage, there are occurrences of disruptions to the power or air conditioning that can have an impact on service availability. Does an end user really care if the application is down because of a network, server, or air conditioning problem? The answer is no! If the IT Manager has established documented Service Level Agreements, then it’s in his/her best interest to do an effective job to maintain those service levels by managing all elements that could impact an outage… and that includes power or air conditioning.

Would you like to be able to visualize and communicate both the environmental and economic impact of energy usage across your infrastructure? If your answer is yes, then IBM has the solution for you. It's called the IBM energy dashboard, and it's a versatile, role-based information dashboard that collects metrics from IT, facilities and physical assets, giving you a way to communicate current and past energy and thermal performance in real business terms.

Consider these questions, and what you currently have to do to find the answers:

How much energy am I using?What services are costing the most in energy consumption?Can I make alterations and still meet my service level agreements?We've made some changes, so how much are we saving on energy bills?

Can you answer them with some degree of ease? Or have you already started scrambling for the answers in spreadsheets, power bills and reports?

Using views from IBM Tivoli Business Service Manager and drawing on information collected by IBM Tivoli Monitoring for Energy Management (and other potential sources), the IBM energy dashboard enables you to consolidate the information you collect and present it in an easy-to-read and insightful format. So what do you get? You get visibility into the energy usage of a broad range of infrastructure components and the relationship of your power infrastructure to the services they support.

Role based, you say?

The IBM energy dashboard gives you the flexibly leverage two dashboard views, First, it provides consolidated energy usage views for your executives and sustainability leaders, giving them visibility in to energy usage, cost, and the environmental impact of the efficiencies achieved. Second, it serves as a launch point for your operations team to drill in to root-cause analysis and help take corrective actions.

Sound intriguing? There’s so much more to it!
To get the full story on how IBM Service Management Solutions can help your organization better manage energy consumption by implementing an energy dashboard, visit our service management resource center to read the executive brief that we recently published.

OK campers (and I mean that literally because that's what I will be doing this weekend), it's that time of year again... summer is coming to an end, and everyone's heading out (and cooking out) for the Labor Day weekend. So rather than talking shop this week, I thought I'd share a couple of things that I recently learned to help stay green over the long weekend (you know I am passionate about this anyway). Why you ask? Because I know that even though we're out of our normal day-to-day routines for a couple of days, we still want to be eco-friendly!

So, as you start your shopping and get ready to fire up the grill, why not consider:

Using biodegradable utensils, bowls, and cups (or reusable ones) to create less waste for your local landfill

Keeping a recycling bin right next to the trash can so that people know you are an eco-friendly party thrower and support recycling

If you do have a charcoal grill, use lump charcoal made from natural products and try to avoid using lighter fluid

Use natural light, such as candles or a small fire, to add to your evening party atmosphere. Avoid using unnecessary energy on those party lights shaped like pineapples and such.

And after the cookout:

Use biodegradable plastic trash bags

Let your guests take home any leftovers so that no food goes to waste

Clean the grill with soapy water or a wire brush instead of using harsh chemicals

Recycle those bottles and cans and any other glass, paper products or plastic that might have been left behind by your guests

So that's it. Short and sweet right? One last thing...have a fun, safe and eco-friendly Labor Day weekend!